Dead But Not Forgotten (29 page)

When he emerged from the shower, he found a thick towel and a fluffy white robe. He dried off and put on the robe. On the counter lay a hair dryer that was already plugged in. Bubba dried his hair.

He went into the bedroom, where Talbot and Felix stood beside the bed. Laid out on the furry bedspread were some clean red boxers, a red jumpsuit sparkling with rhinestones, and a wide white belt with a huge gold buckle. A pair of black half boots sat beside the bed.

“I think you'll find that everything fits,” Talbot said.

Bubba grinned. “You boys sure been TCB.”

Talbot looked at Felix, who shrugged.

“Takin' care of business,” Bubba said. “It's a motto I heard somewhere.”

Talbot nodded. “It's a good one. Do you want us to step outside while you try on the outfit?”

“Naw, you can stay in. Just turn your backs.” Bubba undid the belt of the robe. “No peekin', now.”

“We wouldn't dream of it,” Talbot said. “Would we, Felix?”

“Us?” Felix said. “Never, ever, cross our hearts.”

“All right, then. Gimme a minute.”

They turned their backs. Bubba dropped the robe and reached for the jumpsuit. He thought he saw Felix sneaking a peek, but he couldn't be sure. He didn't say anything, just slipped into the boxers and tried on the jumpsuit. It was just right. He found a pair of socks in the half boots. He pulled on the socks and then sat on the bed to put on the boots. Not a perfect fit, but they'd do. He stood up and spread his arms wide.

“You can turn around now, fellas.”

Felix and Talbot swiveled to look at him.

“You look marvelous,” Felix said.

“He looks better in it than you do, even,” Talbot said.

Felix looked hurt.

“Just kidding,” Talbot said, giving Bubba a critical look. “His hair's a mess.”

“We can fix that,” Felix said. “Sit right over here, Bubba.”

He went to the dressing table and pulled out a stool. Bubba sat down, and Felix and Oscar went to work. It didn't take them long to get his hair gelled and styled into a modified duck's ass.

“What do you think?” Oscar said.

Bubba looked into the mirror and admired himself. “I still got it. I damn sure do.”

“Do you feel like singing, Bubba?”

Bubba thought about it. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to sing for a bunch of folks again. He was feeling better than he had in a long time.

“You got a guitar around here anywhere?” he said.

“We can get one,” Talbot said. “Felix, go tell Jack to fetch his guitar.”

“Hold on,” Bubba said. “I'm kinda hard on guitars. I break a lotta strings.” He touched the big buckle on his wide belt. “These buckles tend to scratch 'em up, too.”

“Jack won't mind,” Talbot said. “He'll be honored.”

“Okay,” Bubba said, “but remember I warned you.”

“Go on, Felix,” Talbot said. “We'll meet you downstairs.”

-5-

Bubba heard the hum of conversation as he followed Talbot down the stairs and along the hallway, but when he entered the room where the big wood cross still stood, the voices trailed off. People turned to look and stopped talking the instant they saw him. Soon there was complete silence as the vampires and fangbangers stared at him.

Felix came up behind him and handed him a guitar. Bubba put the strap over his neck and settled the guitar until he had it just right. He strummed a couple of chords. Russell Edgington brought a microphone and set it in front of Bubba.

“The amplifier isn't state of the art, I'm afraid,” he said, “but it will work well enough.”

Bubba cleared his throat and said, “Hi, ever'body.”

One of the fangbangers screamed, “It's him! It's him!”

The vampire standing beside her shushed her. Edgington said, “Everyone's looking forward to hearing you sing.”

“Well, I guess I could give it a try,” Bubba said. “My throat's kinda dry, though.”

Edgington waved a hand at the room. “Pick anyone.”

Bubba looked around the room. “I like somethin' a little different if it's all the same to you. You wouldn't happen to have a cat around, would ya?”

Edgington looked at him. “A cat? Really?”

Bubba looked back. “Yeah. A cat.”

“No cats. I'm sorry.”

“Shoot.”

“What about TrueBlood?”

“I guess if that's all you got, it'll have to do.”

Edgington snapped his fingers, and in seconds someone handed him a bottle of TrueBlood, which he gave to Bubba. Bubba took a couple of swallows, then drained the bottle and smacked his lips.

“Did that help?” Edgington asked.

“We'll see,” Bubba said.

He struck another chord and then began strumming a rhythm, striking the strings hard. He cleared his throat and sped up the strumming. He felt something moving in him, something that he hadn't felt in . . . He didn't know how long it had been. The feeling had been building in him for a while now, ever since he got unchained.

“Sing it!” someone yelled, and Bubba did. He sang “Mystery Train” and “That's All Right, Mama” and “My Baby Left Me.”

He swiveled his hips. People screamed. He grinned, remembering how it had felt when people had screamed for him at other times, in other places. More people screamed, and his grin grew wider. He launched into “Heartbreak Hotel.”

Betty Joe stood by Edgington and whispered in his ear. “It's like pure hot gold is pouring from his throat.”

“Don't swoon,” Edgington said.

“You just don't know,” she said. “You just don't know.”

Bubba segued into some slower numbers, a sultry “One Night” followed by “Love Me Tender.” Then he launched into “Good Rockin' Tonight.”

“I'll say there is,” Betty Joe murmured.

Bubba was enjoying himself, something rare for him. He found himself wishing he had a bass player. And maybe a few backup singers. But he didn't, so he sang “Don't Be Cruel” without them.

After that number, Bubba stopped and looked around. The room was hushed. He stood quietly for a second before slipping the guitar strap off his neck. When he did that, everyone began to applaud. The noise crescendoed. It echoed off the walls and floor, and it sounded as if there were a thousand people there instead of only seventy or eighty. Bubba grinned and handed the guitar to Talbot.

“Tell Jack I said thank yew,” he said. “I hope I didn't hurt it much.”

“Oh, my, no. You've made it into a sacred object.”

“I need to go,” Bubba said. “I gotta get back to where I belong.”

Edgington was suddenly beside him. “You can't just leave us like this. Stay awhile.”

“Can't do it. Bubba's gotta leave the buildin'. I know the way out.”

Edgington put a hand on Bubba's arm and started to speak, but Betty Joe came up and said, “I promised we'd let him leave. We have to honor that promise.”

“We do?” Edgington said.

“You know we do.”

Edgington dropped his hand. “Very well, Bubba. You may go.”

“You can keep the suit, too,” Felix said. “I want to dream of you wearing it.”

“Thank yew,” Bubba said. “Thank you ver' much.”

He turned and slipped away.

When he was outside in the cool night, Bubba took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He took a few steps with a little swagger, the way he had long ago. It had been a long time since he'd had so much fun. The evening had started out bad, but it had ended real well.

Bubba felt changed somehow. He felt good. He felt as if things were going to be different from now on, at least for a while. He didn't know how or why, and he didn't care. He just knew it was a pleasure to experience what had happened.

There was just one thing he needed to make his night complete. There had already been a little bit of magic, so maybe he could find a cat on the way back to Bon Temps.

It could happen.

NANCY HOLDER

Alcide Herveaux, werewolf and member of the Long Tooth pack, has always carried a torch for Sookie. Alcide famously has a disastrous history with women. Though he and Sookie had chemistry, Sookie had to kill Alcide's murderous ex, Debbie Pelt. After that, Alcide's love Maria-Star Cooper was murdered. Then her replacement, Annabelle, was unfaithful. Maybe this pattern of bad luck began with Alcide's prom date, Emmaline Ravel. You be the judge.

—

NOW . . .

“That best friend must still be dying, Alcide,” Dale the bartender said. “Third night in a row you been in here.”

“Someone's dying, but he's no friend of mine,” Alcide muttered.

Dale put down Alcide's first shot of the evening—what had once been an occasional ritual was becoming more customary—and Alcide threw it back. The bourbon was as hot going down as the slap that still burned his cheek. Dale placed another shot on the shiny varnished oak bar without being asked.

“You have any regrets in life?” Alcide asked Dale. The bartender grunted. And Alcide quirked a half grin. “I'm buying, if you need to lighten your load.”

Behind Dale, the ornate engraved mirror caught a slice of light as someone came in from the steamy Louisiana rain. Idly, Alcide glanced into the glass.

He froze with his second shot of bourbon raised halfway to his mouth. And as he absorbed the shock of what—
who
—he was seeing, the hard, cynical part of his mind spun lemon-sour thoughts:
A dead girl walks into a bar . . .

But his heart broke into a million pieces all over again, and his very soul whispered,
Em. Oh, Em.

Oh, Em.

A LIFETIME AGO . . .

Oh, Em.
Ma belle.

Alcide was buzzing like a live wire. Emmaline Ravel was a spun-sugar princess in her pink prom dress, rosebud pink she said it was called, her blond curls just rushing down the sides of her face and over her bare shoulders like a waterfall, and she smelled so good, like honeysuckle and roses with a little dash of Old Overholt rye on her breath. They were Cajun kids and of course they'd spiked up the punch at their big fancy
fais do-do
. The guys had been merciless to him, laying bets that he'd get laid tonight, because what sweet little girl could resist Alcide Herveaux in a damn tuxedo? With that mop of curly hair and those big green eyes? Him with his little rosebud boutonniere Emmaline had bought him to match her dress, all liquored up and horny as hell?

He'd taken her to the prom in his daddy's Camaro. Steak, dancing, waiting, waiting, waiting. Now that the prom was over, Alcide and Emmaline had finally pulled up at the brand-new construction site his daddy had done the survey for. Alcide was about to unlock the foreman's motor home with the keys lent to him by his friend Roger, who worked for the construction company.

The motor home was like a real house, far fancier than the more modest Airstreams at most of the other jobs. This was going to be a long job and one of the principals owned an RV lot, so they got the foreman a nice place to stay. Front door, back door, kitchen, And a
bedroom
. Which, for Alcide, meant
Score!
It was someplace nice for a nice girl. Also, uninhabited. Roger had told Alcide that the foreman hadn't moved in because the valuable equipment and material he would guard at night had not yet been delivered.

That morning, Alcide had put fresh sheets on the bed and had almost brought a vase of flowers but he didn't want to look like he'd planned it that carefully, even though he had thought of little else since he'd asked Em to go to prom. There was no damn way he could take Emmaline to a fancy hotel like the other guys were doing with their dates; someone was sure to talk and if his packmaster Boyd Lescaux found out, there would be hell to pay. Hot-blooded Alcide had been specifically warned off human girls. Maybe other packs had human friends who knew about werewolves, and they even had human babies, but their packmaster said anybody in his pack who changed in front of a non-pack human would sign their own death warrant and the human's, too. He did not hold to mingling, would have none of this crap of people intermarrying. Wolves were for wolves, period, no matter if you had a firstborn Were or what. Lescaux's word was law and those who broke it knew it, and he'd just as soon kill a mouthy, horny teenaged boy as run free on a full-moon night.

But Emmaline wasn't just any human girl; she was Alcide's girl. And she had a crappy daddy named Zachary Ravel who smacked her around. Ravel subcontracted for several of the larger, statewide construction companies, and he was well-off. But Ravel was a bad man and a worse drinker and Alcide would seriously have loved to kill him. Em had no
maman
anymore and she had bruises all the time and Alcide just wanted . . . He wanted . . . He didn't know exactly what he wanted, except to make life good for her. In the pack, mating meant marking and he wanted to extend his protection to her. But he was the worst thing that could happen to her. He told himself that a million times while he was getting the prom tickets and buying the tux and keeping it all on the down-low from Lescaux—thinking he was crazy but he was crazy in love and that had to matter, didn't it?

So here they were, like newlyweds when the guy carries the girl over the threshold, and he knew she knew why he had driven her there, and that she wanted him as much as he wanted her.

His guilt was exactly equal to his lust. He began to think that if he did this he was a pig and he had better just take her bowling with the Baptist kids at their virginal little after-prom instead of acting exactly like the animal he was.

He had his hand on the front door and she was shyly looking down at the ground, and he would never know if he would have opened that door to have sex with her or not. Because the next thing that happened was a gunshot from inside.

He threw himself around her as her eyes widened and her cry was muffled by his hand on her mouth. She wasn't used to violence, but werewolves live and die violently. Then he heard a moan and he thought the voice sounded familiar. Em was stunned enough not to realize that he was tearing the door off the hinges—or he hoped she was—and he flew inside to find Delano Bouchard flat on his back just off the kitchen beside a tipped-over desk chair, with blood gushing like a broken water main from his chest.

Delano was the town's head building inspector. Alcide's daddy had dealings with him all the time, survey matters. Alcide's father liked him well enough, said he was tough but fair. Now he looked to be dying.

“Go get help,” Alcide yelled to Emmaline, but she was rooted in the splintered doorway, wheezing in terror.

“Lost . . . my nerve,” Bouchard whispered. In his right hand there was a gun. Alcide was so stunned he almost lost his balance as he flattened both his hands over the horrible geyser of warm blood. Bouchard had shot himself.

“Desk,” Bouchard ground out. His eyelids and chest were both fluttering. “Note. Take it. Let 'em know.”

“Oh, God, oh, my God.” Em sobbed wildly, unable to look away. Makeup ran down her face in trails of black and blue and silver.

Alcide picked up the landline. Wasn't hooked up. He pulled out his phone. No bars. He already knew she didn't own a cell phone.

“
Chère
,
go get help,”
Alcide said desperately. He looked at the desk and saw an empty bottle of Jack Daniels and a yellow piece of paper from a legal pad with
CONFESSION
written at the top; below, a paragraph of precisely hand-printed words in blue ink, and at the bottom, the man's signature, which Alcide had seen on dozens of building inspection forms. There were blood spatters on it but the gush had mostly missed it.

“Note,”
Bouchard insisted.

Alcide grabbed it. His hand was blood-scarlet, and now the paper was smeared with it, too.

A truck engine roared close; the motor died and doors opened and slammed; footsteps crunched the same gravel path Alcide and Emmaline had walked up to the motor home. The Camaro was parked behind some magnolia trees, well out of sight.

Bouchard's spasming hand wrapped around Alcide's fingers. His grip was weak. His eyes were bugging out of their sockets. Alcide had seen terror like this a few times before—during executions of werewolves. Boyd Lescaux killed wolves for things other packmasters didn't even bother with.

“Kill me before he . . . gets here,” Bouchard begged Alcide. “Please.”

Then the inspector was dead, the fire of life extinguished from his eyes. His hand slid to the floor and flopped into the spreading pool of blood.

Alcide lunged toward Emmaline and grabbed her forearm. He spotted another door—back door—just behind the desk. One hand clutching the piece of paper, the other dragging his panicking girl, Alcide got himself and Em the hell out of the trailer. She was panting and crying and he scooped her up in his arms and ran.

Ropes of Spanish moss brushed his face. He was listening hard for more gunfire, or men coming after them. He got into the trees and set her down, then unfolded the bloody, crumpled paper and in the moonlight read:

CONFESSION

I, Delano Everett Bouchard, took a bribe from Zachary Ravel in return for signing off on his subcontracted framing work on Stillwater Project #13-721. But I cannot let that stand. A second inspection will reveal that the building is unsafe, and should be undertaken immediately. I have warned Ravel that I plan to recant, and he has warned me that he will strip the skin from my bones and shoot out my eyeballs if I do. I do not have the courage to see if he will make good on that threat, nor to drag my family's name through the mud in a court trial. I am sorry.

I am of sound mind and body.

Delano Everett Bouchard

Oh, my God, that's her daddy,
Alcide thought. Then the trailer exploded and Emmaline was so startled that she lost her footing and crashed to the ground. Instinctively he threw himself on top of her and began to growl, looking back toward the orange-and-yellow flames and thick, oily smoke roiling up toward the moon and blotting it out like a river of blood. The trailer was ablaze, white-hot and untouchable.

Metal screeched and another explosion shook the ground. A hickory tree beside the trailer went up like a roman candle. The grass sizzled. He smelled gasoline and burning flesh.

Was that her daddy in the truck, coming to kill Bouchard just like he promised? Did he set that fire with his filthy, murdering hands?

Alcide got up and took Em's wrist. She stumbled and staggered and turned back to look, like Lot's wife in the Bible. She was wheezing and trying to scream and he wheeled her around and then he heard . . . He didn't exactly
hear
, but he
knew
 . . .

Werewolf.

Close.

Alcide's heart hammered. Every sense ratcheted up to high alert. Warning of danger. Urging him to action. His bones began to ache and his blood to heat. His face tingled, his fingernail beds stung. He began to shake.

Oh, God, I'm going to change,
he realized and he fought it down because if she saw, and
another
Were saw that she saw . . . Boyd Lescaux would kill them both.

No, no, no no no.

More trees caught fire, flames whooshing toward the moon. Reflected flames danced on shaking leaves. Pools of rainwater shimmered. Em was hunched over gasping, fragmenting into panic. That gave him a couple of seconds to try to force the change to stop. Then she straightened and looked right at him.

No!

The horror on her mud-caked face; her crazed, earsplitting screams. She scrabbled away from him, shrieking, making sounds he had never heard anyone make before. Falling and stumbling and bolting, flinging herself out of his reach.

He thought of the werewolf in the woods and ran after her, holding out his hands. Hair and claws and smoke and fiery death. He changed and ran, howling in rage.

The flames came after him; the town talked about that fire for years. He ran searching, still howling. He would have stayed in there and cooked if it meant he could find his Em. But she was like some ghost, vanished into the swamp, and when the sun rose he knew he had to face that she was gone. Not dead, he begged, and he prayed as he had never prayed before or since. He staggered for hours, and then he fell to his knees, clenched his fists, weeping.

Delano Everett Bouchard and his damned confession must be ashes. Everything burned away.

He thought hard about that confession, trying to concoct a story so he could tell his daddy about the bad inspection. But a werewolf had been out by the trailer and Alcide had no idea who it was or if he—or she—had seen either him or Em. He was so scared for her he spent too long trying to figure out how to tell his daddy about the confession without telling him how he knew about it. He was afraid he'd trip up. He didn't know if she was still alive to protect, but there was no way he would take any chances.